CFP: Victorian Body Parts

April 16, 2013 at 12:08 pm (Announcement, Call for Papers, Conferences, Events) (, , , , , )

CFP: Victorian Body Parts

St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum, Clerkenwell, Saturday 14th September 2013

Keynote Speakers: Dr Katharina Boehm (Universität Regensburg), Dr Kate Hill (Lincoln) and Dr Tiffany Watt-Smith (QMUL)

“Mr Wegg, if you was brought here loose in a bag to be articulated, I’d name your smallest bones blindfold equally with your largest, as fast as I could pick ‘em out, and I’d sort ‘em all, and sort your wertebrae, in a manner that would equally surprise and charm you.” (Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 1865)

Why were the Victorians so interested in atomizing the body? What was causing nineteenth-century bodies to come apart at the seams? From articulated bones to beating hearts, from wooden legs to hair bracelets, from death masks to glass eyes, the Victorian body was chattering with its own discorporation.

The results of this fragmentation are successors to the recent scholarly work on material culture in examining the atomisation of the body as a symptom of being surrounded by the commodities generated by the nineteenth century. From objects under glass domes to pieces of the body in glass cases (authentic specimens of which fill St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum), commodification and dissection have much in common.

This conference thus seeks to explore, develop and enrich perspectives on the numerous and varied ways in which the Victorians approached their anatomy, bringing together postgraduate, early career and established researchers to consider why body parts provided such an urgent and stimulating focus within the nineteenth-century cultural imagination.

Possible topics could include, but are by no means limited to:

§ Mementos of the body and the culture of mourning

§ Disability and the “substitution” of the body part

§ Dress and the exaggeration of, or emphasis on, elements of the body

§ Darwin and bodily means of expression in science

§ The “queering” of the body part

§ Measuring the body: deviation from the standards of Western patriarchy

§ Preserving the body: collecting and museum cultures

Proposals of up to 300 words should be sent to victorianbodyparts@gmail.com by Friday 31st May 2013.

Blog: victorianbodyparts.wordpress.com Twitter: @victbodyparts

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CfP: ’1845-1945: A Century in Motion’, Birmingham

April 15, 2013 at 11:27 am (Call for Papers, Conferences, Events) (, , , , , , , )

Interdisciplinary postgraduate conference – call for papers

1845-1945: A Century in Motion

University of Birmingham, 27th June 2013

Keynote speaker – Dr Matthew Rubery, Queen Mary University of London

How did the rapid period of industrialisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries help to shape societies and lifestyles in the West? What types of social changes, movements and developments characterise this time period? This interdisciplinary postgraduate conference, in affiliation with the Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity and hosted by the College of Arts and Law, seeks to explore the various ways in which this century was one of ‘motion’, in every sense of the word. The conference title seeks to encapsulate both the uncertainty and upheaval of this period as well as the physical and cultural movements that occurred at this time. We invite papers addressing these themes from postgraduate researchers and early-career academics working on this period from a variety of backgrounds.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

Cultural or social movements

  • political movements
  • the Women’s Movement
  • arts movements (musical, artistic, literary)
  • religious and philosophical
  • popular cultural trends (food, fashion, advertising)

Physical movements

  • mass movement of people (mobilisation of soldiers, migration from towns to cities)
  • transatlantic and inter-continental travel (including emigration and immigration)
  • leisure and tourism
  • transport
  • changing landscapes

Development and progress

  • media (cinema, audio technology and radio, print media)
  • scientific and medical advances
  • technology
  • economic growth and/or recession
  • development of nationhood

These headings are suggestions only; we welcome proposals exploring crossovers between these topics, or addressing them from interdisciplinary perspectives. Abstracts of 250-300 words for 20 minute papers along with a short biographical note of no more than 50 words should be sent to pgculturalmodernity@contacts.bham.ac.uk by the 17th May 2013. We welcome any questions that you may have; please do not hesitate to contact us at the above address.

See the website or follow on twitter @pgculturalmod

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Victorian Print and Popular Culture Seminar Series

April 10, 2013 at 12:11 pm (Announcement, Events, Seminar Series) (, , , , , )

Victorian Print and Popular Culture Seminar Series
(Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History)
Liverpool John Moores University

Tuesday 7th May 2013
Dr Annemarie McAllister (UCLAN) The Temperance and the Working Class Project: public engagement with academic research on popular culture

The teetotal temperance movement, from its beginnings in Preston in 1832, swept the country and numbered millions of members by its high point just before the first world war. It remained fairly strong in its heartland of the North West for much of the twentieth century, and yet had almost disappeared from popular knowledge by 2012, 180 years after the signing of the first total abstinence pledge. This talk will explore how the ‘Temperance and the Working Class’ Project has managed to raise the profile of temperance history locally and nationally, an undertaking involving oral history, performances and re-creations, three ‘Demon Drink’ exhibitions, local and family history events, guided tours, and of course much traditional and social media work. From mounting a pop-up exhibition with volunteers in a local shopping centre and tweeting about it, to singing temperance ballads in costume, the life of an academic takes some strange turns when in receipt of a Heritage Lottery Fund grant. The story of the Project reveals how nineteeth- and twentieth- century cultural history can provide a focus for the social creation of, recapture of, and debate about community identity. Engagement with historical ideas and artefacts can also relate to current social concerns and influence individual life choices. For more information please see www.demondrink.co.uk and www.demondrinkextra.wordpress.com

To be held in room 112, Dean Walters Building, St James Road, Liverpool, 5:30pm to 6:45pm. Refreshments to be provided.

For more information contact: Dr Clare Horrocks (Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture and Communication) C.L.Horrocks@ljmu.ac.uk  Tel: 0151 231 5035

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Notice: 2013 VanArsdel Essay Prize

April 5, 2013 at 9:11 am (Announcement) (, , , , )

Notice: 2013 VanArsdel Essay Prize

Graduate students are invited to submit essays for the 2013 VanArsdel Prize for the best graduate student essay on, about, or extensively using Victorian periodicals. The winner will receive $300 and publication in Victorian Periodicals Review. Submissions should be 15-25 pages, excluding notes and bibliography. Manuscripts should not have appeared in print.

Send e-mail submissions to VPR Editor Alexis Easley (maeasley@stthomas.edu<mailto:maeasley@stthomas.edu>) by May 1, 2013. Submissions should be formatted as Word files in Chicago style with identifying information removed. In an accompanying e-mail, applicants should include a description of their current status in graduate school.

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CFA/CFP Deadline Approaching: Victorians and the Law

March 9, 2013 at 12:50 pm (Announcement, Call for contributors, Call for Papers) (, , , , , )

CFA/CFP Deadline Approaching: Victorians and the Law

Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.

The eighth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Cathrine Frank (University of New England), will take a fresh look at the interfaces between literature and legal cultures in the Victorian period. From the Reform Acts through the growth of colonial law to the establishment of divorce courts, nineteenth-century legislature shaped and responded to the same cultural developments – the rise of the middle class, industrialisation, imperial expansion, and shifting ideas about gender, to name but a few – that were also eagerly debated by literary writers. The politics and aesthetics of many nineteenth-century novelists, poets and playwrights were informed by a sustained engagement with legal debates and practices. Their works often reflected on, and sometimes challenged, the law’s construction of civic, social and gender identities, while also casting a critical (or appraising) eye over the bureaucratic apparatus on which legal practice was built.

We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

*wills, trusts and guardianship accounts: the materiality of the legal archive

*Victorian trials, sensation and theatricality

*criminal law, lawlessness, realist epistemologies and the detective plot

*Victorian law and gender

*the reaches of the law: imperialism and the legal & literary creation of colonial identities

*intersections between genres of legal and literary writing

*“brought up a barrister”: nineteenth-century authors, legal training, professionalization and the bar

*radical politics, social change and the working class in Victorian literature and the law

*debates about rights to intellectual and literary property

*the spaces and cultural venues of legal practice

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions to our next issue is 1 April, 2013. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

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CFP/CFA – Queer Relations: Revising the Victorian Family (proposal deadline: 1 April. 2013)

February 25, 2013 at 1:13 pm (Announcement, Call for contributors, Call for Papers) (, , , , , )

Queer Relations:  Revising the Victorian Family (proposal deadline: 1 April. 2013)

Dr Duc Dau, University of Western Australia and Dr Shale Preston, Macquarie Universitycontact email: duc.dau@uwa.edu.au and shale.preston@mq.edu.au

We invite contributions for an upcoming volume of essays which examine the Victorian family through a queer lens. 

The Victorian family can be taken to mean the nineteenth-century nuclear or extended family, or the family of texts associated with the Victorian period (e.g. nineteenth-century and neo-Victorian texts).  We are looking for exciting interrogations into the discourse of the Victorian family.  These interrogations can focus on untraditional familial arrangements, non-normative relationships, polyamorous attachments, queer families in disparate communities/locations (e.g. circuses, theaters, brothels, homes for fallen women, monasteries, convents, hospitals, schools, ships, military units, thieving fraternities), homosexual/homosocial utopias, erotic fantasy worlds (e.g. fairy, goblin), etc. 

Alternatively, the interrogations can examine queer 20th and 21st century texts/domains/mediums that allude to or mash-up the Victorian family of texts (canonical or otherwise) or seek to revise traditional notions of the Victorian family.  Focus areas can include but are not limited to the novel, poetry, film, television, theater, auto/biography, periodicals, the internet, steampunk etc.

Please send 300 word proposals and a two-page CV to the editors Dr Duc Dau at duc.dau@uwa.edu.au and Dr Shale Preston at shale.preston@mq.edu.au by 1 April 2013.

Completed chapters of 6,000 – 8,000 words will be due by 1 February 2014.

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Call for Papers/Articles: Victorians and the Law

February 22, 2013 at 11:37 am (Announcement, Call for contributors, Call for Papers) (, , , , )

Call for Papers: Victorians and the Law 

Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies 

The eighth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Cathrine Frank (University of New England), will take a fresh look at the interfaces between literature and legal cultures in the Victorian period. From the Reform Acts through the growth of colonial law to the establishment of divorce courts, nineteenth-century legislature shaped and responded to the same cultural developments – the rise of the middle class, industrialisation, imperial expansion, and shifting ideas about gender, to name but a few – that were also eagerly debated by literary writers. The politics and aesthetics of many nineteenth-century novelists, poets and playwrights were informed by a sustained engagement with legal debates and practices. Their works often reflected on, and sometimes challenged, the law’s construction of civic, social and gender identities, while also casting a critical (or appraising) eye over the bureaucratic apparatus on which legal practice was built.

Submissions of no more than 7000 words are invited. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

-       wills, trusts and guardianship accounts: the materiality of the legal archive

-       Victorian trials, sensation and theatricality

-       criminal law, lawlessness, realist epistemologies and the detective plot

-       Victorian law and gender

-       the reaches of the law: imperialism and the legal & literary creation of colonial identities

-       intersections between genres of legal and literary writing

-       “brought up a barrister”: nineteenth-century authors, legal training, professionalization and the bar

-       radical politics, social change and the working class in Victorian literature and the law

-       debates about rights to intellectual and literary property

-       the spaces and cultural venues of legal practice

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions to our next issue is 1 April, 2013. Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

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CFP: Neo-Victorian Cultures

February 12, 2013 at 10:12 am (Conferences, Events, Announcement, Call for Papers) (, , , , )

CFP: Neo-Victorian Cultures

24-26 JULY 2013, LIVERPOOL JOHN MOORES UNIVERSITY

While aesthetic, political and artistic returns to the Victorians have been prevalent throughout the twentieth century, the last decade has seen a particular surge in scholarly work addressing the seemingly ceaseless desire to reassess and adapt Victorian texts, theories, ideas and customs. Such work has focused in particular on manifestations of the neo-Victorian on page and on screen; this conference seeks to build on but also expand these debates by bringing together writers, practitioners and researchers working on the lasting presence of the Victorians since 1901 in a wide variety of realms, ranging from art and architecture to science, politics, economics, fiction and film. In doing so, the event aims to further expand the vibrant field of neo-Victorian studies both within and beyond the arts and humanities through an examination of the Victorians’ continuing influence on twentieth and twenty-first century culture. We therefore welcome and encourage abstracts from postgraduate students, academics and independent researchers from all academic realms in the hope of capturing the diverse work being done on Victorian afterlives across a wide spectrum of disciplines and across traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Topics may include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

* the ethics, politics and aesthetics of adaptation
* the gender and sexual politics of neo-Victorianism
* neo-Victorianism on page, screen and canvas
* neo-Victorian subcultures
* the Victorians in contemporary architecture, art and design
* neo-Victorian journalism/ the Victorian press and contemporary journalism
* the Victorians in contemporary science and medicine
* the neo-Victorian canon
* teaching neo-Victorianism
* the neo-Victorian marketplace; consuming and marketing the (neo-)Victorians
* Steampunk

Presentations should take the form of 20-minute papers. We also welcome proposals for fully-formed panels or roundtables. For individual papers, please submit a 300-word abstract as well as a short biographical note. For panel and roundtable proposals, please provide a brief outline of the session’s aims together with abstracts and biographical notes for each speaker and for the proposed panel chair or discussant. All proposals should be emailed to the organisers at organisers@neovictoriancultures.org.uk no later than 1 March 2013. Please do not hesitate to email us if you have any questions about the event.

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Victorian Panel for Woolf and the Common(Wealth) Reader

January 23, 2013 at 10:38 am (Announcement, Call for Papers, Conferences, Events) (, , , , )

Victorian Panel for Woolf and the Common(Wealth) Reader: The Twenty-Third Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf

This panel aims to contribute to ongoing critical discourses on the points of contact between Victorian and modernist literary cultures. Papers will explore the varied connections between nineteenth-century literary/artistic networks and those created by Woolf and her contemporaries. Organized around the theme of ‘Victorian Commonwealths,’ possible topics include:

  • communities of authors, artists, and their audiences
  • cross-generational streams of creative influence
  • women and common wealths of knowledge
  • public institutions for literature and art in Britain and abroad
  • representations of the British Commonwealth (first called the ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ in 1884) as a political and cultural entity

Please submit 250-word abstracts of papers as attachments in .doc format, by 30 January 2013 to:

Kathryn Holland, Panel Organizer and Chair, MacEwan University

Hollandk5@macewan.ca

Woolf Conference website: http://www.sfu.ca/woolf/

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Job Advert: Research Associate in Victorian Print Culture at the University of Kent

January 17, 2013 at 1:29 pm (Announcement, Job or Post Doc) (, , , , )

Job Advert: Research Associate in Victorian Print Culture at the University of Kent

Research Associate in Victorian Print Culture at the University of Kent
Job Type Research
Contract Type Fixed Term (18 months, 50%)
Salary Type Pro Rata
Salary (£) 31331 – 31331

 

 
HUM0345, School of English, Closing date: 24 Jan 2013 The Role

This post has arisen as a result of the award of an AHRC Project Grant to Dr Catherine Waters for a study of the Victorian ‘special correspondent’. The project analyses the significance of special correspondence and its evolution in the context of developments in the periodical and newspaper press throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The post-holder will assume major responsibility for identifying and charting the careers of individual ‘specials’, writing new entries on these figures for the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism and will work collaboratively with Dr Waters on interpretation of the material collected, in order to better understand the formal and thematic features which make this form of writing distinctive.
It will be necessary for the post-holder to spend most of their research time at the British Library site at St Pancras, London. Occasionally, the post-holder will be required to travel to the British Library site at Colindale, London. Travel expenses will not be paid for travel to the St Pancras site, but will be paid for travel to the Colindale site.

For further information please see the Job Details at the following address:

http://jobs.kent.ac.uk/fe/tpl_kent01.asp?s=raCzFKhUsJVaXxJsp&jobid=37365,6525353415&key=33681965&c=486552621298&pagestamp=sesapvtfknvqfclhch

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